Who will need such a concept as a ‘national grid’ then?

183500/5000, carry the eleventy-two…

Criminy, it’ll take little more than a month to fuel one jumbo! We’re cooking with gas here!

This isn’t a future with much flying in it, is it?

Tim adds: Er, 100 hectares to a km2, 10,000 sq metres to a hectare. So 1,000 (must be, 1,000m2 times 1,000 is one million m2 and a sq km has 1,000 m by 1,000 m to make the same 1 million sq m) x 500 litres per 12 hours for a km2. ie 183500/500,000 is three jumbos a day.

They really should all be lined up and shot, the lot of them.

Exxon is trying to find a clean way to wean us off oil, and they hate them for it. It’s not nearly hair shirted enough.

Tim adds: Not sure about the jet fuel but area in Austria is 83,872,000 (ie, 83 million) pieces of 1,000 m2.

Global oil consumption is around 80 million barrels a day (right order of magnitude at least).

So if each 1,000 m2 piece of land can be used to make one barrel of oil then we’re about there….for oil alone, that is.

Barrel of oil is 42 US gallons…160 ish litres.

So if each 1,000 m2 area can make 500 litres in a day of jet fuel, ie three barrels of oil (not right but close enough for this sort of shit) then we can make three times current global oil usage from an area the size of Austria.

(Yes, yes, I know, efficiency and all, but this is simply to illustrate scale.)

Oil appears to be about 35% of total energy usage globally.

Looks like we’re actually about there then on that calculation………

Which is inherently limited by collecting area. According to the godly Wikipedia, the energy content of jet fuel is 35MJ/litre. Insolation in the Sahara (best we can do) is about 4ooW/2, which is about 400J/s/m2.

So presuming 100% efficiency- (and you’re not going to get anything close to that, are you?), 1000 m2 of algae bathtub will create a litre of jet fuel equivalent every 35E6/400/1000 seconds, which is one litre every 87 or so seconds.

You wouldn’t need pumping facilities, you could have some guy standing there filling an oil can from a spigot at that rate. Doesn’t look like very hopeful, does it?

Thermodynamics. It’s not concentrated anywhere. That’s why we have the ancient Earth to thank for concentrating it millions of years ago. It’s not just a converting problem. It’s a collecting problem.

Tim adds: Err, yes, thus the research into ways to do it efficiently….

They will be perpetually unhappy until mankind is reduced to living in caves and eating bark (‘sustainably’ collected and organic, of course).

Tim adds: Sure. Luckily, we’ve got a fuck of a lot of sunshine. Hundreds and hundreds of times total human energy usage. The trick is being able to convert it to the form where we can store and transport it…..

Fuel is stored energy. You can’t get more energy out of it than you put into making it, unless you’re lucky and find some underground that the Earth spent millions of years putting energy into. That is, oil is the result of all those plants storing energy then getting buried and the energy concentrated. That’s why it’s such a good energy source. You don’t need to put energy in to make it, because that was already done millions of years ago by the sun and some plants. All you need do is pump it out of the ground.

So these algae need to be fed as much energy as you plan to get out of the fuel later, plus some considerable extra amount for losses in the process. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, even for algae.

Tim adds: Yes, true, the energy input here is called “sunshine”.

Well, d’uh!

Luckily, that coincides with their customer’s desires, which are also to have something to put in a car.

Sorry, Greenpeace. No-one wants to walk or cycle everywhere. That’s just a fact of life you are going to have to get used to….

I wonder what the reaction is going to be from various greens. Will any of them applaud this? Or condemn it?

Today’s Times:

Greenpeace was sceptical yesterday. Robin Oakley, a climate change campaigner, said: “It fits their business model of finding something you can put in a car.”